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Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

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Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#151

Post by icelancer »

_lx4l wrote: post #108
MattGaiser wrote: post #14

I’ve had four jobs in my life and have always been stunned by what is still done by hand. Every company had a task which could be heavily automated but was instead consuming 4-30 people. So if you think the software market is large, consider all the stuff software never reached.

We have an "internal systems" team at my current company to solve this problem. The product manager for the team knows everyone and keeps tabs on what's being done that could be automated. It's not used to replace people (at least it hasn't been yet) rather it's used to allow the team to stay the same size and scale up their operations to meeting the growing business demands. I think many companies could benefit from…

Ha, I'm happy this exists. I created this department at the company I founded at and directed it for some time. We call it the internal tools department. It still exists today and is run by a former employee of the department. It's very valuable for us.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#152

Post by chii »

aabhay wrote: post #129
chii wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry there's 7 billion people on this planet, and most of them wear at least 1 pair of shoes (so 4 end bits), which means there's about 4x7,000,000,000 pieces of these things. I'm surprised it's only a 800,000,000/year industry! That means they are able to produce it so cheap (i.e., less than 2c per bit, which is an over-estimate)!

Yeah, now multiply 28 billion by... three cents. Also, just because an industry brings in lots of revenue doesn’t make it a good industry. I’m sure there’s trillions of dollars exchanging hands in the plastic bag market, but I’m also sure that the margins are getting squeezed so tight that even a PhD in OR couldn’t find a percentage point to optimize. The margin per bag is essentially zero.

> The margin per bag is essentially zero.

that's a good outcome imho (and it's not zero, it's just very low). But this means that the value of the bag and the cost of production is very, very close, meaning it's available to as many people as possible!

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#153

Post by daseiner1 »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #109
Swizec wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know the ends of shoeleaces, those little plastic bits? Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry Cardboard box industry in USA is bigger than the NFL, NHL, NBA, and the other major sports leagues combined

If you had kids of the right age, into Phineas and Ferb, you'd know those little plastic bits are called aglets ;_)

i’m really sorry to do this to you, but also, if you’re a recent grad of the right age ;)

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#154

Post by kyllo »

cambalache wrote: post #34
_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, u…

That's basically what Salesforce did, but they ended up skimming a lot higher % than that

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#156

Post by deng »

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

I'm in Germany and of course everyone here has at least heard of SAP and knows it's huge, but I guess not many people know just how huge. SAP consultancy is a big market here with lots and lots of job openings. I knew a few people who did that, it's usually a very well paid job, but it's well paid because otherwise no one in his right mind would do it. From what I heard, it's incredibly boring while at the same time incredibly stressful when you're on-site. Also, I've never met anyone who actually liked SAP.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#157

Post by eb0la »

There are hidden "unicorns" everywhere. Sometime ago I heard Germany had a lot of "small" companies that are leaders in their market niche but you don't have it in the radar.

For instance: Hohner (the Harmonica manufacturer), or Flexi (dog leashes)

Every country has some of this hidden unicorns; but it is easier to spot them from the distance.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#158

Post by MattGaiser »

ge96 wrote: post #147
MattGaiser wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes. My aunt paid $8000 for nothing more than a Wordpress gallery for her business and paid $100 for every change she wanted to make. People who don't know tech will pay a lot for it.

Man whoever sold that sounds like they made bank. I'm not sure what upkeep you have to deal with regarding Wordpress security but yeah. Sounds like it's low-risk enough generally eg. just show pictures.

You periodically need to update the PHP version to keep up. I have a dormant personal website and maybe 1-2 years I have to go update the PHP when I get an email about it.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#159

Post by neilwilson »

cambalache wrote: post #34
_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, u…

Same with accounts generation.

Almost certainly most operations accounts and tax filings could be fully auto generated from their bookkeeping - if the bookkeeping was good enough.

You could do that by constraining the bookkeeping and adding some intelligence to the reporting.

So why do bookkeeping firms like Xero stop at basic bookkeeping? Because they sell via accountants - who make a lot of money piping data from one computer system into another to change the format a bit.

Enabling certain people to maintain their mystique is lower hanging fruit than pushing for full automation.

Plus who wants to program accounts systems...

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#160

Post by abiogenesis »

Aeolun wrote: post #117
abiogenesis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did that and was successful to some degree, but it's not easy. I would've done something else if I knew that back then.

You skimmed a small part of SAP’s market? Like, a specific niche that you built a better tool for? I can only imagine that if you create any tool worth competing with SAP, your customers also have to be huge companies.

Yes, we competed with SAP in a specific industry and honestly our tools were better and more user friendly, and no, they were not all huge companies, which is one of the reasons we were able to eat SAP's cake because we were much cheaper. I believe we got the job 90% of the time when we were shortlisted with SAP.

We lost some customers to SAP later on because they become bigger and "consultants" told them that they should switch to SAP because, you know, all big companies use SAP. I haven't heard of any success stories from those customers yet (this is not entirely SAP's fault though).

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